Details of the WebDIS Prototype at the NPS
Front-end is provided by Netscape running one vehicle simulation applet on each node and by Cosmo Player VRML2 browser displaying the multi-vehicle simulated world.
Java applet propagates local vehicle and communicates via the bridge daemon with other nodes, sending local vehicle PDUs and reading remote vehicles PDUs.
Java applet and VRML browser interact via EAI (External API) as specified by SGI/Cosmo Player add-on to the VRML2 protocol. JavaScript is used to acquire handle to the VRML scene and LiveConnect is used to pass this handle to the Java applet.
Applet performs dynamic real-time updates of the scene graph based on local vehicle simulation and remote vehicle locations received via PDUs.
This prototype is successful and demonstrates that one can use Web technology for Distributed Event Driven Simulation -- the major use of simulation in DoD